


Advanced Trials of Friendship

by PenneName



Category: Community
Genre: Angst, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Rape Aftermath, Rape/Non-con References
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-20
Updated: 2016-04-19
Packaged: 2017-11-03 23:13:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,008
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/387043
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PenneName/pseuds/PenneName
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jeff is raped. Most of the study group Brittas their reactions. Especially Britta. And Pierce.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Jeff tries to sneak into the room, to sit down before the gang notices he’s walking funny. But ever-observant Annie spots him as he walks into the study room.

“Where have you been, Jeff? We have a test tomorrow!”

“Hospital.”

Annie gasps “What for?”

“Mugged. Can we start now?” Jeff tries not to wince as he sat down.

“Mugged? C’mon, you couldn’t have fought him off, a big guy like you?” Pierce scoffs.

“Maybe it was a gang,” Annie suggests.

“Racist!” Shirley accuses.

“You can’t wear Burberry scarves and $400 cologne in bad neighborhoods,” Annie jokes. “You’re practically asking for it.”

“How big were these guys? They had to be at least seven-twelve,” Pierce presses.

“Seven-fourteen, actually. Can we begin now?”

“You seem like you’re hiding something. There was an episode of The Office where Andy gets beat up by a girl. Did you get beat up by a girl? Are you ashamed your life is paralleling a recent and terrible episode of The Office?”

They won’t let drop the subject. The teasing comments overlap, getting louder, until Jeff finally shouts, “I was raped, OK?”

And then they’re all silent. The outburst was too spontaneous and angry to be fake.

“…really?” Britta asks.

“No,” Jeff says, unconvincingly, “but I made you all feel bad, right? So, where are we? Bio? Anthro? What the hell are we studying?”

He focuses on turning the pages of his book.

“If you were raped, you really should get help,” Annie says in her special, soft ‘I memorized all local help hotlines’ voice.

“Help? It’s hard enough for a woman to admit she was sexually assaulted. What resources do you think there are for men? This is reverse sexism and it’s woefully unaddressed…” Britta continues her rant, and Pierce starts asking questions.

“Men can be raped? Are you serious? Was it by another dude? Does this mean you’re gay now?”

Shirley joins the cacophony, recommending good pastors and bible verses to get him through this tough time. Jeff gets up and walks out. Everyone is too worked up in their own things notice.

Except, apparently, Troy, who calls after Jeff in the hallway.

“Hey, T-Bone. Guess you’re finally the man of the group now.”

“Don’t.” Troy says, uncharacteristically seriously. “Don’t say things like that, OK? I just wanted to remind you there’s a test tomorrow. If you’re still, you know…whatever.”

Jeff doesn’t really know, whatever, but when he gets home, he studies.

The test is easy. He finishes early, even before Annie, and avoids seeing anyone on his way out. He goes home, watches TV, and ignores his ringing phone.

 

 

There’s something vaguely menacing about a bunch of young female students standing outside a college chanting “Men can get raped, too!”

It’s Britta’s awareness campaign. Far more people are interested in this one than in any of her others. To be fair, her last one was about baby otters (“they’re called kits!) who were forced into war slavery. It wasn’t very popular. Britta managed to take the cuteness out of otters.

 

“Jeff?”

Jeff’s eating in one of the least used part of the library, where all the books are so old and musty that even insane bibliophiles can’t stand the smell. He’s pretty sure there’s an open container of aged hummus somewhere on the shelves. Annie’s the one who pointed the area out to him, so it makes sense she’d figure out that’s where he is.

“I did your homework for you,” she sits down next to him.

“I don’t need you to do my homework out of pity.”

She looks puzzled. “I always do your homework for you.”

 

Jeff doesn’t want to go to class. Since it comes down to him going to class or putting up with Shirley’s concerned phone calls and Britta showing up outside his door with a solidarity candle, he goes to class.

 

 

“Jeff,” Abed keeps up with Jeff in the hallway, despite Jeff’s long legs and almost sprinting pace, “did you know that up to 10% of sexual assault cases are male?”

“No, I did not know that. Thank you, Snapple cap. Shouldn’t you be quoting Girl With The Dragon Tatoo or something?”

“I thought I would try something different. Movie references don’t work on people, ” Abed says, “so I thought statistics would comfort you.”

“Statistics might comfort you, but they don’t comfort normal people.”

“Statistics don’t comfort me. That’s why I assumed they would be useful to someone else.”

“Statistics don’t comfort anyone. Now, if you excuse me, my class is here.”

“That’s a janitor’s closet.”

“Yes, it is.”

“Oh. I see. You want me to leave.”

 

There’s pamphlets about Jesus on his car. He swipes them off.

 

“I had a feeling you wouldn’t want to go to class today, so I wrote a bom threat.”

“That could get you into a lot of trouble, Troy.”

“No. A BOM threat. It stands for ‘barrel of monkeys.’ It’s not my fault if they don’t know how to read.”

 

Jeff stares at the poster on the wall. In big letters on top, it says “WHICH ONE WAS RAPED?” There’s a young woman, with long black hair clutching books and smiling at the camera; a happy elderly couple; a burly man in a prison jumpsuit; and the guy from A Serbian Film. The bottom says “ALL OF THEM,” and beneath that, in slightly smaller print,

MALE SEXUAL ASSAULT  
IT DOESN’T JUST HAPPEN TO WOMEN

Troy and Annie watch Jeff carefully, waiting for the fall-out. But Jeff just laughs, loud and almost manic. Annie is concerned that Jeff is having a breakdown, but next to her, Troy starts laughing, too.

In even smaller font, at the very bottom, are the words “A Britta Perry Awareness Campaign.”

Annie laughs, too. It’s a pretty ridiculous poster.

Jeff is jovial by the time he, Annie and Troy get to the study room.

“Britta, thank you. The world needs to know that male sexual assault doesn’t just happen to women.”

“I’m sorry that I don’t find your rape as funny as you do. You were sexually assaulted,” Britta barks.

“I know. I was there.”

Almost inaudibly, Britta whispers, “I just wanted to help.”

Of all the study group members, it’s Britta who most gets off on helping people. When she finally has the opportunity to do something really meaningful, she just Brittas it. And she knows. She knows how stupid her campaign is. She knows how useless everything she has done is. Suddenly, Jeff feels bad for her.

Then he remembers that, as far as problems go, not being the best comforter in a study group is a pathetic thing to worry about, so he saves his pity.

“Were you in jail?” Pierce asks.

“What?” Jeff thinks that Pierce’s comment is some sort of dementia thing, which might be good, because if he’s finally sent to a nursing home, he won’t go to Greendale.

“The whole rape thing. I assume you were in jail and dropped the soap.”

“Some figures estimate that as many as twenty percent of inmates have been—“ Abed begins, but he stops himself when he sees Troy roll his eyes.

“I’m just trying to understand how it happened,” Pierce says. “I mean, you are a dude…”

“Here’s how it happened,” Jeff begins, “I was at a bar, not one of my usual places. Bit skeezier, wanted an easier lay, a dirtier girl” (he ignores Pierce’s “Shouldn’t you be gay now?”) “and I found a chick—biggest breasts ever—and just stared at them all night. I mean, I talked to the girl, but, anyway, point is, I wasn’t watching my drink. And I’m minutes away from sealing the deal, but I’m not feeling well. So I get up and I walk out, and then I’m really not feeling well. I’m dizzy. I can’t even make it to the car. I just sink down against a building outside, and I can’t move. I’m still conscious, I just…can’t move.

“This guy, a creep from the bar--he couldn’t have been much taller than me, but he was broader, and he seemed so big then—he comes by and drags me into an alley. And I’m so out of it. Everything’s surreal. He’s dragging me to an alley, and he’s taking off my pants, and he lies me on my stomach, and then he just…enters me. He was prepared for the night—lube and condom, and whatever he slipped into my drink. And he just takes me, right there in an alley. He finishes, drops my pants over me, and leaves. And I just lie there. For hours.

“And then I notice the sun is coming up, and I fumble to put my pants on, and I limp back to my car. I drive to the hospital. They ask me why I’m there—and shit, I can’t tell them I was raped. And I can’t tell them I was mugged, because most muggings don’t end with a guy bleeding from his ass. So I told them I want to be checked out for diseases. Let them think I had an anonymous gay hook-up. It’s not that far from the truth.

“And I wait for my test results, and I come back clean, and I get a new pair of pants and I go home. And I stay there for a few days, I drink too much, I sleep a lot, and then I finally drag myself back here. To school. To you guys.

“And that’s how it happened. I wasn’t in jail, and I’m not the guy from A Serbian Film, and I don’t care what percentage of sexual assault happens this way.”

“So, are we done here? Can we do anthro or bio or whatever we’re doing?”

He’s aware that everyone is staring at him, but he doesn’t engage them by looking back.

 

Annie runs after him in the hallway.

“That was really brave of you.”

“Eh. That was the easy way out. Bravery would’ve been letting them keep prattling.”

“Bravery’s just being you,” Annie smiles shyly.

Jeff groans. “Oh, come on! Don’t say things like that.”

Annie throws her arms around Jeff. He smiles down at her. Even though she barely breaks a hundred pounds and is eye-level with his chest, Jeff feels safer with her around.

“Annie?”

“Hm?”

“I hope you know that it’s going to be a while before I want to have sex with you.”

Playful and laughing, she shoves him away as if he'd offended.

“I have to get to class. See you later?”

“Yep,” he says. She leaves, moving down the hallway with her odd little schoolgirl-bouncing-skip-walk. He calls after her, “I’ll tell you when I’m ready!”

He doesn't know if he's joking or not.


	2. Chapter 2

Pierce is doing the whole "sensitivity" thing. He prefaces his sentences with "Trigger warning," as often as he used to preface them with "Now, I don't mean to sound racist, but..."

It will last a week. He'll start realizing it's not helping him score college chicks, and then he'll return to complaining about "outrage culture" and college students who can't handle reality.

But now, right now, very now, Pierce is explaining to a young woman about male rape, and speaking in a loud voice about how "a friend of mine, let's call him 'Heffrey Zinger...' and Jeff's bones chill.

Jeff knows her. She's pretty--no, hot--she's in Jeff's Sex and Shakespeare class, and they've traded as many innuendos as a class like that allows. She knows his name. Out of the corner of his eye, Jeff can see her stare at him. 

He sits down next to Pierce.

"What was that, Pierce?"

Jeff's eyes are wide with interest, genuine interest, no hint of a threat. It's enough to make Pierce scared.

"I was just telling this young lady how, uh, someone we're both very close with, uh..."

Pierce stumbles over his words and then he excuses himself and stumbles over his feet. 

The woman smiles. "He is such a creep. Thanks for getting him away from me."


End file.
